Is the newyear timing still correct?
By GinFin
@GinFin (59)
Belgium
December 26, 2006 7:08am CST
Every year we start the countdown to te next year... We count from 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.... "Happy Newyear!!!" but is the time still accurate? Every second there still is a minuscule error in the interval, so in the limit of the age of the arth this error would be uge.... so is this time representation accurate?
1 response
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
26 Dec 06
I assume that you are referring to the shift between our standard time and solar time. We adjust the clocks on rare occassions by 1 second to fall in line with solar time, but of course we will never get it accurate.
If we are going to be that pedantic, there is a time delay before the light from our watch reaches our eyes, or before the sound of Big Ben striking midnight reaches our ears.
The whole thing is academic, since time itself is a man made concept. We class 2007 as the number of years since the birth of Christ (Anno Domini) despite the belief that he was born at a different time of year and scholars estimate that he was born in 4 BC. Britian even lost about 11 days when we changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, so it would be a formidable task to amend it properly.
The Islamic calendar is probably more representative than the Christian calendar since it was based on Lunar Months.